Alienware Area-51 7500 Desktop Review and Ratings

Editors’ Rating:

Our Verdict:
If you've been hankering for an Alienware gaming PC but been deterred by your limited bank account, the Area-51 7500 has the deal and the performance you've been looking for—and it only requires a few tiny trade-offs. Read More…

What We Liked…

Excellent gaming performance for the price

Stylish design

What We Didn’t…

Lacks the all-around polish of more expensive Alienware systems

Unexciting processor

Smallish hard drive

Alienware Area-51 7500 Desktop Review

We admit it: We have a history of being hard on Alienware. We're not apologizing for this, since we think maintaining high standards is crucial when dealing with a company that has such a standard of maintaining high prices. Two entries in Alienware's Area-51 line of gaming desktops we've looked at over the past year or so, the ALX and the ALX CrossFire, didn't have quite the stormbringing performance we would demand from systems costing upwards of $8,000.

Ratchet down the price three or four times, however, and we get a bit more lenient. So we're not particularly surprised that a new version of Alienware's Area-51 7500 desktop, ringing in at a “mere” $1,499, isn't just a good deal by the standards of Alienware—it's a good deal, period.

Admittedly, you don't get with the Area-51 7500 every exciting perk you do with the more expensive machines. Of the in-box premiums, the keyboard and mouse are of the unexciting, feature-free variety (rather than the gaming-enhanced Logitech models we've seen with previous systems), though you still get the mesh ballcap and no-skid mouse pad. In terms of other internals, you'll have to give up that choice water cooling, but you still get that one-of-a-kind extra-terrestrial case design that ensures Alienware desktops look like no others.

But with performance this good for this little money, who cares? The Area-51 7500 came out well ahead of other systems we've recently seen in the same general price range, such as the Dell XPS 630, turning in some flat-out great results in our gaming tests. In our DirectX 9 (DX9) gaming tests at 2,560x1,600 resolution, the Alienware machine managed scores of 10,624 in Futuremark's 3DMark06, 83 frames per second (fps) in Company of Heroes, and 40.734fps in Supreme Commander—all outstanding at such a high resolution.

The DX10 numbers expectedly slacked off a bit, though in many cases were still above average: We saw 58.3fps for Company of Heroes, 25fps for World in Conflict, and 29.8fps in Call of Juarez, all at 1,280x1,024. (At higher resolutions, the drops are more noticeable: At 2,560x1,600 in Company of Heroes and World in Conflict, the Area-51 7500's scores were downright unplayable; Call of Juarez, at 17.6fps at 1,920x1,200, was barely passable.) We've just begun using Futuremark's new 3DMark Vantage DX10 benchmark, so we don't have much basis for comparison yet, but the Area-51 7500 scored 10,399 on the Entry level, 3,637 on Performance, 2,204 on High, and 1,386 on Extreme, more or less mirroring our other test results for this system.

The Alienware attained these results primarily via—what else?—the now ubiquitous 512MB GeForce 8800 GT graphics card, which just about every manufacturer has discovered as a way to pack a tremendous, inexpensive punch. There are two here, set up in a Scalable Link Interface (SLI) configuration. The other components are somewhat more mundane, including the 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 processor, which is decidedly middle-tier (and responsible for the merely acceptable results in our productivity benchmark tests), and a hard drive with 250GB of space—adequate, but not much more. At least you get 2GB of DDR2 RAM, which you need for smooth Windows Vista performance, and integrated 7.1 audio is provided for the full surround-sound experience.

These are nice additions, to be sure, but when you get a good computer at a very good price, as you do with the Area-51 7500, there's not much of a blow that needs to be cushioned.